Butter in grams: the stick, the cup, and the block

A stick of butter weighs 113 grams, and a US cup is 227, exactly two sticks. Butter is the one ingredient where the shape in your hand changes the whole problem: a stick with printed marks, or a European block with none.

What a stick of butter weighs

The US stick is the reason butter conversions feel easy in an American kitchen. One stick is a quarter pound, and the wrapper prints the same amount four more ways.

Two sticks make the 227 gram cup. The USDA is the only authority that publishes a whole cup of butter; King Arthur carries one butter row and it is the stick, written as half a cup and 8 tablespoons at once, so the tablespoon below comes from the USDA rather than from him. The two agree, because a stick is a fixed factory weight rather than something you spoon and level. That agreement is why butter has no charts-disagree block, and the reasoning behind when we show one is on the methodology page.

Butter conversions in full

A tablespoon of butter is 14.2 g by the USDA; the table above follows the ounce, so its grams and ounces agree to the gram.

Europe has no stick: cutting a block by the centimetre

Outside North America butter comes as a 250 gram block with a smooth wrapper and no marks to measure by. German kitchens solve it with a ruler. The block is about 10 centimetres long, so a centimetre is 25 grams, and the method is one division: take the grams you need, divide by 25, and cut that many centimetres off the end. A recipe asking for 100 grams wants 4 centimetres; 60 grams is a shade under two and a half. French recipes call the same block a plaquette and cut it the same way, which French recipe measurements sets in context. And when a recipe wants the whole thing, 250 grams of butter in cups is the block translated to American units.

A Slavic recipe measures butter by that block: Poland and Ukraine sell a smaller 200 gram block, so there the same trick runs on a different length, and half a block is 100 grams rather than a US stick. The wrapper is your ruler either way, which is the closest a block gets to the printed marks on an American stick. A whole Polish recipe, with its dekagrams and its own packet sizes, is on Polish recipe measurements.

The 113 versus 125 gram trap

A US stick is 113 grams. European conversion sites routinely round it to 125, because 125 grams is a clean half of their 250 gram block, and half a block is close enough to a stick to eyeball. It is not close enough to bake with: 125 against 113 overstates the butter by about 11 percent, and a translated recipe built on it bakes greasier than intended. When a European source tells you a stick is 125 grams, it means half its own block, not the American stick.

A cup of butter in Japan

Japanese recipes measure butter by the cup rather than the stick, and their standard tables put a 200 millilitre cup of butter at 180 grams. It is not the US cup scaled down: the tables measured it, the same way they measured every other ingredient, which is why we take the figure from them rather than from arithmetic on the 227 gram US cup.

Questions about butter weight

How many grams is a stick of butter?

113 grams. A US stick is a quarter pound, which is also 8 tablespoons, half a cup and 4 ounces, so 2 sticks make the 227 gram cup.

How do I measure butter from a European block without a scale?

Divide the grams you need by 25 and cut that many centimetres off the end. A 250 gram block is about 10 cm long, so each centimetre is 25 grams; 100 grams is 4 cm.

Is a stick of butter 113 or 125 grams?

113 grams. European charts often call it 125 because that is half their 250 gram block, but that rounds the true stick up by about 11 percent, enough to grease a pan too heavily.

How much does a tablespoon of butter weigh?

14.2 grams, from the USDA. The tablespoon works cleanly for butter because a US stick is printed with tablespoon marks along the wrapper, which a European block is not.

Sources

USDA FoodData Central SR Legacy for the 227 gram cup, the 113 gram stick and the 14.2 gram tablespoon. The Kagawa Nutrition University standard tables, as reproduced by Benricho, for the Japanese cup. Koch-Wiki and German baking references for the 250 gram block and the centimetre method. Full citations on the sources page.